Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  The Zone of Interest 2023

  Watched 01 Dec 2023

  Shoots to the top of the list of 2023 films one is thankful wasn’t made using Smellaround or Odorama technology, racing past The Contestant. (Last year this category was handily won by The Northman over Triangle of Sadness.)

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  May December 2023

  Watched 29 Nov 2023

  So that’s how people get jobs as music supervisors.

Popular reviews

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  Babylon 2022

  Watched 05 Jan 2023 5

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  I tweeted this after watching, and got both some likes and some pushback from folks I respect. So at the risk of over-explaining the joke, let me “go deeper” than 140 characters.

  I’m definitely not the only one to reach for the Requiem For A Dream shorthand; I hadn’t yet read Nick Davis’s review when I made my tweet, but I feel like I’m in good company whenever one of my thoughts overlaps with his in even the most fleetingly surface way. Calling Babylon a…

• 

  Asteroid City 2023

  Watched 23 Jun 2023 2

  It’s tempting to be crass and accuse Wes Anderson of pushing his head ever further up his own asteroid, especially since I think there’s some truth there. I feel like after conquering emotional storytelling terrain in his best film Moonrise Kingdom he’s been on a project of increasing emphasis, starting with The Grand Budapest Hotel (the last of his I thoroughly enjoyed), on the geometric architecture of not only his frames, but of his frames’ frames. This one has a rather indigestible…